My Presidential Platform: Middle East Policy

Good evening, my fellow Americans. I am Manifesting Destiny by becoming the President of the United States. This is the second plank of My Presidential Platform: A Living Document. Read the first plank, Homeland Security and the Military, here. Read all posts here.

Here is what we are going to do about the Middle East.

I’m gonna tackle another big one up front here, because the President is not afraid to tackle hard questions.

This is a real clusterfuck. I’m going to be honest and say that I don’t have THE ANSWER, which doesn’t make me any different from any other world leader of the last six millennia. But here is an answer.

I know Israel is very important to some people, namely, the people who have lived most or all of their lives there. Though I am told the same land was once very important to some other people who also lived most or all of their lives there.

I also know that it is possible to relocate. I once lived in New York. Now I live in California. Sure, it was hard to move. I had to learn where to put the oil in the Subaru (short answer: at the oil-change place) and how to parallel park on a steep hill on a one-way street on the left-hand side. There were some tears—but not a whole trail of them. You know how you get a whole trail of tears? Move people off of their land by force, make them live in a ghetto/on a reservation/in a refugee camp/under apartheid and attempt to exterminate them. This makes them cry, and then, sometimes, blow themselves up.

Yes, this also happened to the Jews. It was very, very traumatic in a way words like “traumatic,” or any words at all, will never, ever be able to describe. But that doesn’t make it okay to do it to someone else. If you do all the worst things that were done to you in the past to everyone you encounter in the future, you will always have bad relationships.

My Middle East policy will require one further relocation. It will be optional. No one will be forcibly relocated.

Everyone is always saying that Israel is “about the size of New Jersey.”

New Jersey is one of the most populous states in the Union. However, the Pine Barrens seem to be pretty empty. Why else would they be called the Pine Barrens? The Sopranos episode, “The Pine Barrens” was shot in the actual Pine Barrens. They looked pretty barren to me. Do you know what else is great about the Pine Barrens? They’ve got an aquifer containing some of the purest water in the United States! Do you hear that, Israel? No more desalination!

I bet all the Jews in Israel could easily fit into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey–especially if they lived in the same sorts of high-rise apartment buildings they now inhabit in Israel, which I am told is quite crowded. If the amount of money the United States gives annually to Israel in aid–$3 billion–were instead used to build high-rise apartment buildings in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, we could house the whole population of Israel tomorrow. BOOM. But really, what we are going for here, is less boom. More room, less boom. That will be the slogan for the relocation of willing Jews to Jersey.

And if they don’t like it, they can go back! For the first year I was in California, I sublet my apartment in New York, just in case. (It was a rent-stabilized one-bedroom one block from the Lorimer stop.) But when you move to a place with better weather that is less crowded and less stressful than the place you left, you never go back. I am confident that anyone who moves to New Jersey from Israel will like it very much. In my experience, New Jersey is actually very crowded and stressful, but what I am hoping is that it will be less so than Israel.

In this way, so many more Jews can be together, in our true homeland, the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut tri-state area.